choosing a Dress Fabric for Elora

Do you remember the swatch service offered by The Confident Stitch?

It’s a subscription service that brings a coordinated collection of fabrics into your home each season on tidy, information-packed swatch cards. You can choose from three different subscriptions: Garment Fabrics - Cool Tones, Garment Fabrics - Warm Tones and Quilting Cottons.

Last month I received the autumn mailing and began thinking about a new dress for Elora. You really can’t help but be inspired to start a new project, with all the great suggestions on the cards themselves, not to mention the videos too! (If you’re curious, here’s the video for the fall Quilting Cottons card.)

Elona dress by Ikatee

Well, I had in mind to sew this Elona dress by Ikatee designs. Ikatee is a French company that publishes their kids garment patterns in both French and English. I sent this photo of the dress to Confident Stitch and asked them if they could recommend an ideal fabric. I’m an intermediate garment sewist, and one thing I have learned is that the fabric changes everything about the way a garment turns out!

Diamond Textile Shirt-Weight Wovens

Maisie at The Confident Stitch drew my attention to the Nikko Square Stitch fabric on the cool-tone garment card. It’s part of their collection of Diamond Textile Shirt-Weight Wovens. These fair-trade fabrics come from India. The medium weight cottons are more loosely woven than a quilting cotton, which gives a soft drape perfect for clothing.

There are lots of pretty colors, but I favored the Square Stitch in Rust. I like Elora in warm autumnal shades, which bring out the reddish tones of her hair.

This week, Elora and I printed out and assembled the digital pattern. As you can see, we’ve started cutting! During the process Elora convinced me to add a blue fabric to the dress, which may have been a crazy idea, but I wanted to support her creativity. Next time I should involve her in the fabric-choosing process. They grow up so fast into their own tastes, don’t they?

With any luck, we’ll have a finished dress to show later this week!